Appointment of Chief of Defence Staff and Creation of the Department of Military Affairs: A Gamechanger

A.K. Singh; R. Chandrashekhar

Authors

A.K. Singh Center For Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), New Delhi, India
R. Chandrashekhar Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS), New Delhi, India

Keywords:

Military Affairs, India, South Asia

Abstract

The announcement by the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi in his Independence Day address to the nation of Government's intent to appoint a Chief of Defence Staff (CDS) marked the gamechanger event that the country was to embark upon. The subsequent appointment, in December 2019,2 of General Bipin Rawat, to the newly created appointment as its first incumbent and the simultaneous creation of a Department of Military Affairs as a separate vertical within the Ministry of Defence with the CDS as its ex-officio Secretary are each and together tectonic shifts that have moved the balance in civil-military relations to a new normal. It has also disruptively altered the entire edifice of the structure of decision-making relating to matters of the military.

Author Biographies

A.K. Singh, Center For Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS), New Delhi, India

Lt Gen AK Singh, PVSM, AVSM, SM, VSM (Retd) is a Distinguished Fellow at CLAWS, former GOC-in-C Southern Command, and former Lt Governor, A&N Islands and Puducherry
R. Chandrashekhar, Centre for Joint Warfare Studies (CENJOWS), New Delhi, India

R. Chandrashekhar is a Senior Fellow at the Centre for Joint Warfare Studies and an erstwhile member of the Armed Forces Headquarters Civil Service.